I have spent about 70 hours trying all sorts of different things to a get a boat hull flat pattern. It seems inventor can only do it by generating a series of Sheet Metal lofted flanges and then manually joining the flat patterns for each loft section. I have not explored to see if the face command can draw a complex face that can be flatterned and I have not explored the "Project Flat Pattern" command.
A simple boundary patch created a near perfect face of the hull - should I be looking at exporting this face into other software that can flattern it?
Any ideas will be helpfull.
Solved! Go to Solution.
Solved by WHolzwarth. Go to Solution.
If I think of a boat hull I can see deformation of the plates, and this is what Inventor won't do. Plastic deformation and flat patterns of sheetmetal parts is not acheivable in Inventor. You would probably need to run this through other software.
Ok here is the file so the surface i need to get a flat pattern for is the boundary patch. i.e. half of the hull. Any methodology or any way I can flat pattern it would be great pls.
Here's a STEPout from Rhino.
Be aware that only an approximation can be done. But depending on the curvature of the surface you can get good or worse results.
In this case the flattened surface is about 0.5% greater than the hull surface. IMO it could be used.
Walter
Walter Holzwarth
Hey that looks awesome, I downloaded Rhino to look at it, correct me if I am wrong pls - The top view is the flat pattern and how did you export from inventor and import to rhino and what did you do to acheive this? Also do you think I would get a more accurate flat pattern if i model the whole thing in Rhino? And why does inventor not do this? I would have thought that inventor should have been able to do this.
Thanks heaps so far - I feel some what relieved after my efforts and seeing this flat pattern.
Lots of questions.
- Transfer to Rhino by STEP, same way back to Inventor
- Modeling in Rhino wouldn't really help. If you have the same basic surface, you'll get the same results with Rhino's Smash command
- Inventor only can unroll developable surfaces, which are curved in only one direction. The hull is 2-direction curvature.
Walter
Walter Holzwarth
So you used the smash command to produce that flat pattern right and then cross checked it's surface area against the shaped part?